UPCOMING EVENTS

Earlier this week, Berlin-based AVARI launched a new technology that allows marketers to use predictive learning to send personalized email campaigns. We’ve researched and spoken at length on the email marketing landscape and the neighboring technology that makes it go. Predictive, real-time, personalized — whatever you want to call it — is certainly a growing category, especially for B2C (it’s what helps you get snow boots in Massachusetts and flip flops in Florida within the same email campaign). The common thread among most of those solutions is that it’s a pain to get them installed and requires data analysts to put them to use.

Marketers wind up with a big, confused mess of solutions that you’d expect to be a little simpler, given email’s status as the most reliable ROI-generating digital marketing channel. And given the troves of customer data available to be captured, most predictive or “big data” marketing solutions are hardly marketer-ready. It still requires a lot of engineering help to install them and data analyst help to mine the data and segment customers.
AVARI is unique in its simplicity, quick up-time, and broad range of applications for B2B. Marketers send one campaign with AVARI dynamic content, using any email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation platform, and recipients get millions of unique combinations of content that are personalized for each.

The new product launch, called “Next Best Content,” automatically recommends the most relevant content from a brand’s content marketing arsenal to each individual customer or email recipient. Marketers use the drag and drop, block style interface to drop in dynamic content within the context of their campaigns.

VB’s research on marketing automation, email marketing, and personalization are each available on VB Insight, and free with your Martech subscription

The technology relies on harnessing “implied” data versus explicitly expressed data. Explicit data is easily measured (visits, purchases, clicks etc.). Implicit data is a whole lot trickier. These are behavioral metrics like reading time and form or cart abandonment. According to AVARI CEO and cofounder Kevin Dykes, “There is less explicit data on which to base content marketing recommendations because people [either] don’t buy, or always have to submit a form for free content. Also, [an action such as] clicking to a page with an infographic is not enough data — people may land on the page and quickly leave. Whether or not they scrolled to the bottom to review the whole thing is an implicit data point that much more strongly indicates preference.”

The modern sales funnel for B2B is especially hard for marketers to get their arms around. AVARI is part of the onslaught of marketing technology in the “sales acceleration” category which is ripe with new funding, and ultimately signals some huge organizational changes for marketing and sales.

AVARI is off to a strong start in the category, working with more than 7,000 businesses in 59 countries.